Also, foliage could be animated, such as moving tree branches in the wind. Future Workīesides the aforementioned collaboration features, we are working on enhancing the VR experience in a number of directions: Game engines have very advanced sequencing and animation capabilities, which is a good opportunity to make the scenes more dynamic by adding pedestrians and vehicles. Using the same menu, users can also change the time of day in order to inspect the effect of shadows thrown by tall buildings or by vegetation.įigure 5: Being immersed in the city model, users can inspect different scenarios and change the time of day. Users can activate a menu by tilting their controllers (with a similar gesture to looking at a wristwatch), and from there select, switch and compare different design scenarios (Figure 5). The point of being able to get right into a planning scenario is crucial to obtaining a sense of scale and to get an impression of specific views.ĬityEngine supports modeling of multiple design scenarios within the same project, and these scenarios can be imported in the VR experience as well. The users will then find themselves in the city and can move around (again through teleporting), can get on top of buildings to get a bird’s eye view, and so on. This can either happen through predefined point-of-interest (PoI) indicators or by teleporting to any desired location. This enables us to craft fluid, data rich, real-time rendered experiences for our clients and stakeholders.įigure 4: Interacting with the city model, in this case scaling and rotating the model.Īfter identifying an area of interest and viewing it from an aerial view, the users can decide to immerse themselves in the model. Now, with the new CityEngine 2017.1, we can export directly to Unreal Engine. In the past, creating interactive high-end visualizations of several hundred thousand buildings was a challenge. Since then, customers have started making use of the CityEngine to UE4 workflow very quickly:ĬityEngine allows us to model HOK’s massive urban planning projects. With the release of CityEngine 2017.1, CityEngine has supported exporting city models using Datasmith, and the functionality has been continuously extended.
#Cityengine hdk demo manual
Datasmith is a workflow toolkit that streamlines import of data into Unreal Engine and reduces tedious manual import conversion tasks to a minimum. Since Unreal Engine 4.24, Datasmith has been generally available to all Unreal users. In 2017, Epic Games announced Datasmith for Unreal Studio, the former enterprise suite based on Unreal Engine.
#Cityengine hdk demo full
teleport and immerse themselves into the 3D city model and view current situation and future scenarios at full scale.Ĭompared to the existing ArcGIS 360 VR solution for mobile headsets, which is based on static viewpoints, the CityEngine VR Experience offers a much more dynamic experience, where users can freely move around 3D city models and interact with them.įigure 2: An urban planning scenario in CityEngine.interactively analyze the sun shadows throughout the day,.collaboratively review and compare multiple urban planning scenarios (using multiple VR headsets),.In VR, users now can intuitively interact with the 3D city model to Centrally located in the office is a table with the 3D city model placed on top. The basic idea of the VR experience is to create an environment that planners and other stakeholders are familiar with: The users initially finds themselves in a virtual planning office, with a nice 360° view, for example of their city (Figure 1). The experience comes as a ready-to-use and extensible Unreal Engine project template, from which CityEngine scenes can be easily imported, configured and viewed. It builds on a combination of ArcGIS CityEngine, which is used for data integration, 3D modeling and scenario development, and Epic Games UnrealEngine, which then renders the scene in real-time, controls the VR headset and its controllers, and allows for collaborative studies using multiple headsets over the network. The CityEngine VR Experience is a complete solution for easily creating a premium VR application to explore your 3D city models and urban planning scenarios. Sign up for Esri’s XR news here to receive regular updates. Interested in news VR / AR / MR work at Esri?